The Looming Midterms—2
Which of three scenarios will unfold on Tuesday?
As many of my free subscribers no doubt noticed, last Friday’s post included (for the first time) a paywall about 2/3 of the way through. This week, my Monday and Friday posts will be available for free (with no paywall), but on Tuesday evening I will be doing a late-night audio-only post about the midterm results as of 11pm or so. Paying subscribers will be able to listen to that audio-only post on Wednesday morning, while everyone else will be prompted to become paying subscribers in order to listen to it. I may also try Substack’s new “chat” function on Tuesday evening for an hour or so while watching the returns come in. That will also be available only to paying subscribers.
Part 1 of this post, which appeared on Friday, placed this week’s election in international context while also wondering whether the Democratic emphasis on the threat Republicans pose to small-d democracy might backfire. In Part 2, I take a narrower view, focusing on the domestic political context. I won’t quite be making predictions, but I will be sketching various scenarios and outlining what each would mean if it turns out to be correct.
To prepare for this post, I anticipated needing to remind myself of the precise margins for each party in previous midterm elections. That would help to set a baseline for expectations. But lucky for me, William Galston, my colleague on the “Beg to Differ” Bulwark podcast, did this research for an informative Brookings column, enabling me to crib the data I needed.
Past Midterm Patterns
If we limit ourselves to a president’s first midterm and begin with Ronald Reagan, we find the following pattern of significant losses for the party holding the White House:
In November 1982, Reagan’s job approval was 42 percent; the GOP lost 26 seats in the House and broke even in the Senate.
In November 1994, Bill Clinton’s job approval was 41 percent; the Democrats lost 54 seats in the House and 10 seats in the Senate.
In November 2010, Barack Obama’s job approval was 45 percent; the Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and 6 seats in the Senate.
In November 2018, Donald Trump’s approval was 41 percent; the GOP lost 42 seats in the House and won 2 seats in the Senate.
The exceptions to this pattern of wipeouts involved the two Bush presidencies.
In November 1990, the first Gulf War was approaching and George H.W. Bush had an approval rating of 69 percent. As a result, the GOP lost only 8 seats in the House and 1 seat in the Senate.
In November 2002, the September 11 attacks were a recent, raw memory and the build-up to the invasion of Iraq was in full swing, with George W. Bush enjoying 67 percent job approval. That led to a true outlier for a midterm election, with the GOP gaining 8 seats in the House and 2 in the Senate.
Baseline Expectations
Where does that leave us in 2022? With a situation that resembles 1982, 1994, 2010, and 2018. Joe Biden’s approval rating, currently at 42 percent, is similar to Reagan’s, Clinton’s, Obama’s, and Trump’s when their parties experienced a midterm drubbing. There are, however, two possible mitigating factors this time around. For one thing, there are fewer swing districts than there used to be. For another, Biden had negative coattails in 2020, with the Democrats losing 13 seats in the House while winning the White House. That could well hold down the size of expected Democratic losses on Tuesday because, as Galston explains, “House Republicans are beginning from an historically high base for the minority party and may already have achieved some of the gains that otherwise would have occurred this year.”
These considerations lead Galston to predict Republican gains of 25-30 seats in the House, which would be more than enough to take firm control of the lower chamber of Congress. (Galston offers no prediction for the Senate.) I will treat that as my baseline expectation in what follows. That doesn’t mean I’m endorsing the prediction. (We don’t make precise predictions around here.) It means I’m treating an outcome in that range as the all-things-being-equal “normal” outcome for a president with an approval rating in the low 40s and more than a dozen lost seats in the previous election.
So: If Republicans pick up fewer seats than this baseline expectation, it should be considered a disappointing result for them and an encouraging one for the Democrats. If Republicans pick up more seats than this baseline expectation, it should be considered encouraging for them and disappointing for the Dems. And an outcome within the 25-30 seat range should be seen as roughly what one would expect, “all things being equal.” Though as I’ll explain in my scenarios below, all things are rarely equal, and they certainly aren’t this year. Once we factor in those other “unequal” considerations, this year’s midterm elections look likely to send an ominous message to the Democrats.
Scenario #1
Republicans underperform, winning just a handful of House seats (either too few to take the lower chamber or just barely enough to do so) and failing to make a net gain in the Senate, leaving the upper chamber in Democratic hands.
Given the historical patterns summarized above, this would be an unprecedented result in which Democrats performed more like Bush 41 in 1990 and Bush 43 in 2002 despite Biden’s much lower approval rating. This would likely tell us several things—first, that the polls were not biased against Republicans this year and in fact might have been slightly biased against the Democrats; second, that the highly unorthodox and/or extremist candidates Republicans ran this year (Hershel Walker, Blake Masters, JD Vance, Kari Lake, Mehmet Oz, Doug Mastriano, among many others) turned out to be a liability after all; third, that Trump’s continued negative presence in the news hurt Republicans; and fourth, that the GOP paid a heavy political price for the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion.
Scenario #2
Republicans do about as well as one would expect, winning 25-30 House seats, easily taking the lower chamber, and winning 1-2 Senate races, giving them a very narrow majority there as well.
As I noted above, this is what one would expect to happen in a normal midterm election under a Democratic president, so many will be inclined to react to such an outcome with a shrug of the shoulders: Oh well, the fundamentals held. But this would be a mistake. What this outcome would mean is that at least in some races the GOP didn’t pay a penalty for running unorthodox/extremist candidates. It would also mean that constant focus on Trump in the news (including the January 6 hearings) did little to keep Republicans from winning elections. And it would also mean that the Republicans suffered few negative electoral consequences as a result of the Dobbs decision. All three of those implications should produce shudders among Democrats.
Scenario #3
Republicans overperform, with undecided voters swinging overwhelmingly in their direction, producing a win of 40 or more House seats and 3-4 Senate seats, giving the GOP firm majorities in both houses of Congress.
This would be a disaster for the Democrats, and not just because it would mean the end of Biden’s ability to pass legislation, get judges confirmed, and avoid congressional investigation (and possible impeachment) over the next two years. It would also be a disaster because it would indicate that Republicans not only didn’t pay a penalty for running unorthodox/extremist candidates, for sticking by Trump after January 6 and through his subsequent legal troubles, and for the Dobbs decision, but that the GOP may well have been rewarded for all of this. Maybe not rewarded in the sense that voters positively liked any of it, but definitely in the sense that voters just didn’t care about any of it enough to say, I can no longer countenance voting for this party.
Or to put it in a slightly different way: Such an outcome would demonstrate that Biden’s message about the danger Republicans pose to the democratic system, echoed by many other members of his party as well as by numerous mainstream media personalities, fell on deaf years. Partisan Democrats might believe it, but rank-and-file Republicans don’t, and neither do independent voters.
The final reason why Scenario #3 would be a disaster for Democrats is that it would verify that polling remains broken, with an enduring left-wing skew, most likely driven by plummeting Republican response rates. More than ever, we’d have reason to suspect we’re flying blind when it comes to public opinion, with Republicans systematically enjoying greater support than the polls reveal.
So that’s how I see it as we head into the midterm elections. Unless something very big breaks in the news between now and then, I anticipate that Friday’s post will revisit this one to determine which of these three scenarios comes closest to describing what happened and then reflect on what it means going forward for the Republicans, the Democrats, and the country as a whole.
We will see how it goes tomorrow. But, the Democrats are as cynical as the Republicans. Many of the candidates who may be elected tomorrow would not have gotten to the fall had the Democratic money people not boosted them in the Republican Primary. If the Democrats really thought those candidates were dangers to our democracy, why would they play that game in Republican voting areas?
One of the reasons I’m not that worried is because if you look at the Hispanic vote as an example, they are breaking Republican and so the question is why? I think it’s crime and inflation and the party in power pays for those things, it will have negative consequences because Trump will read more into than is really there, but it won’t be true, voters are just moving there to punish the party in power